7 Essential Tips for Taking Your Business Online

If you ever thought of taking your business online or expanding your already existing business then I think you will as well would like to know some of these essential tips.

The dawn of the Internet has levelled the playing ground for small businesses to compete with major corporations in many ways. According to internet facts and statistics of 2018, there are over 4 billion internet users and 3.2 billion of them are on social media. Over 64% of all in-store sales, or sales to the tune of $2.2 trillion, were influenced by the internet. Its roles and applications to business cannot be overstated.

The impact of the internet will only keep increasing, but only the informed will benefit. Thus, understanding its roles and applications will help business owners to take advantage of the powerful opportunities it has to grow their business and make operations more effective. So here are seven essential tips to keep in mind when taking your business online.

Tip 1: Consider Your Business Goals and Budget

The first thing you have to do as an entrepreneur who wants to take his/her business online is to establish your business goals and clarify your objectives.

Goals promote planning, and planning helps to determine how goals will be achieved. But before you come up with a strategic plan, you must first consider your budget.

Everything must start with your budget. Considering your budget will enable you to see what is feasible and what goals are within your reach. Don’t be one of those ambitious entrepreneurs that want to achieve everything at the same time and end up more frustrated than when they first started.

Let’s assume you want to build a business blog like ours; considering your budget, you may choose to start with a free theme and as well ignore some expensive security plugins that run in thousands of dollars.

Tip 2: Establish a Website that Suits your Brand

On taking your business online, creating a website must be on the list. However, a stunning web design is not enough.

Your website is considered to be the most important component of your online presence, so it needs to be in sync with your brand in all aspects. The design needs to reflect your brand identity.

When you are establishing a website, you need to make sure that the colors, the texts, the images, the navigation and everything else are geared towards an optimized representation of your brand. It’s important that you give attention to what your business logo is, as this will go a long way to tell your audience who you are.

Tip 3: Know the Purpose of Your Website

What is the purpose of your business website?

If you can’t provide an answer right away, there’s a good chance that you’re squandering your best online asset.

Nevertheless, it’s not always easy to identify the purpose of a website as it has many unique purposes like describing your expertise, building your reputation, generating leads or nurturing sales. And there are some major factors to be considered like the nature of your business, the geographic scope of your business, and the supporting business structure.

Each type of site has its own set of characteristics, which is why it’s hard to mix and match features as it may lead to confusion. But if you have already defined the purpose of your website, you will eventually realize that it can accomplish many different strategies to help your business grow.

Tip 4: Host Your Website in a High-Quality Web Hosting Company

While most businesses see the value of creating an awesomely designed website, the importance of selecting a good web host often takes a back seat. Because all the money spent on design isn’t worth a thing if your site isn’t being found.

Choosing a web host is an often overlooked, yet critical, factor in determining your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) rankings since the quality of your web host is a key determinant in how accessible your website actually is. If your site is already struggling with being discovered on search engine, you can hire the services of the Ebusinessroom Ventures, known to be the best digital marketing agency now.

The poorer the host quality, the more often your website will be down, which can damage your SEO rankings. On the other hand, if your website is accessible, it’s more likely to be found in relevant searches.

Web hosting could also affect your website’s security. Poor website security can be truly detrimental to your business website in general.

Attackers can hack your website, create spam pages, and generate massive amounts of fake backlinks to your site. This could also increase the chances that your website could get infected with malware, which can lead to your site being blacklisted by different search engines.

It’s for reasons like this and more that we recommend, Siteground.com web hosting plan above others. Their technical support is simply amazing.

Tip 5: Generate Traffic to Your Site

To put it simply, website traffic is the number of visitors to your website. This is important because the number of visitors parallels to the number of opportunities you have to gain new customers.

The number of visitors to your website also means the number of opportunities your business has to share its brand, to give an impression, and to build a relationship with customers. More web sites views and more time spent mean more engagement and more opportunities to gain customers that will contribute to the growth of your business.

Tip 6: Set Up Your Blog

A statistics from Hubspot’s 2012 Inbound Marketing Report revealed that 57% of companies who have a blog reported acquiring a customer from their blog. Also, a survey of marketers revealed that 81% of businesses say that their business blog is useful to critical for their business.

Tip 7: Take Advantage of the Social Media

A study also conducted by Hubspot in 2014 revealed that 92% of marketers claimed that social media marketing is important for their business, with 80% indicating their efforts increased traffic to their websites.

And according to Social Media Examiner, 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media. These statistics implies that using social media as a marketing tool can help you grow your business and pad your wallet.

Through social media, you can gain valuable customer insights using proven data. Every day there are over500 million Tweets,4.5 billion Likes on Facebook, and95 million photos and videos uploaded to Instagram – Social media really generates a huge amount of data about your customers in real time.

Also, when you have a presence on social media, you make it easier for your customers to find you and connect with you. It can allow interactivity that can be very beneficial to your business for a variety of reasons. Therefore, you must start taking the advantage of using social media as early as today!

Conclusion

Now, was this article able to give you all the fundamental tips you need for taking your business online? Are you beginning to nurse that feeling that now is the best time to draw your share of the billions of dollar flying across the internet? Or you need expert guide to help you pull through all the hurdles?

If yes, I recommend you join our CEO, Emenike Emmanuel as he walk you through an intensive 6 weeks training on how you can start your online business from scratch. Click here to see details.

This is a guest post from Erin Feldman. She’s an independent e-commerce business owner from California specializing in yoga and active wear. She is also a publicist at First Choice Finance

I am the CEO of Entrepreneur Business Blog, Chief Evangelist of Ebusinessroom Ventures, Lead Coach of The Excellent Entrepreneurs' Network (TEEN) and Convenor of #NaijaSitUp.
My business is to help you start, manage and grow a profitable and sustainable business using digital marketing strategies.
I have been featured and mentioned on platforms like, BloggingTips, StarterStory, StatusBrew, Realty Times, Emerald TV, SmartBCamp, Blogging from Paradise, Write Worldwide, Enterprise Boom, Atang Magazine, etc. In 2019, my blog won the Best Digital Media Award from AB Afrikpreneur.
When you want to hire a professional to handle your online marketing, I'm your go-to-expert you can speak to.
You can connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn with this handle, @EmenikeNg

7 Comments

#2 is a biggie Emenike. I built a blog around a brand, thinking of branding first before I created my brand or even online income streams. All need to vibe nicely for you to create an impact. This impact makes things go with your online business. Think branding, and then grow your business out of your authentic brand. Fab post, thanks for sharing!